NIH Pauses Awards to Harvard, Other Schools With Frozen Funding

The National Institutes of Health has been instructed not to make grant payments to Harvard and other universities whose funds have been frozen, according to an internal email reported by several news outlets.

The email directs NIH employees not to communicate with universities about whether or why their funds have been frozen. The list of affected schools includes Columbia, Cornell, Brown, and Northwestern.

The NIH press office did not respond to a Saturday morning request for comment on reasons for the freeze.

The pause of pending NIH awards follows the $2.2 billion freeze on multi-year federal grants and contracts announced by the White House last Monday after Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced the University would defy the Trump administration’s demands.

Harvard received $488 million in NIH funding in fiscal year 2024, accounting for the majority of its total $686 million in federal research funding. The current pause is expected to hit Harvard Medical School the hardest, which alone received more than $171 million in NIH grants during the same period.

HMS leadership announced at a Wednesday town hall that the school planned to lay off employees and shrink programs, citing both the White House’s semester-long cuts to federal funding and an ongoing budget deficit.

Past NIH funding terminations under the Trump administration have primarily been linked to programs involving gender and sexual identity, health disparities, or Covid-19 and its vaccine — which the administration has deemed outside the scope of “agency priorities.”

A Crimson analysis found that more than $110 million in NIH grants — all of which featured themes that conflicted with the Trump administration’s agenda — to Harvard-affiliated researchers had been terminated from late February to early April.

Harvard spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday morning.

Since the freeze began on Monday, labs have received immediate stop-work orders, halting projects ranging from research on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to studies of devices to treat acute radiation syndrome.

Organismic and evolutionary biology professor Benjamin L. de Bivort wrote in a statement to The Crimson that private funding could not make up for the loss of federal funding as a result of the pause to NIH funds.

“Private funding in the traditional model cannot come close to closing the gaps,” de Bivort wrote, saying that senior labs — which may be ineligible for private fellowships designed for early-career scientists — are especially exposed to the cuts.

“The current situation is extremely dire. It is hard to characterize it as anything other than the potential end of the research enterprise at Harvard as we know it,” de Bivort added.

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.